The Source

Critics’ lives would be easier but duller if they relied less on their own viewing experience than on what directors say about their movies, yet it’s pleasant, and, more important, interesting to find confirmation of my experience of “Shutter Island” in Martin Scorsese’s interview in today’s Le Monde on the occasion of its release in France. Asked by Thomas Sotinel how he approached the elements of the story that have to do with the Holocaust, the director answered:

The idea was to treat the effect of the experience of this horror on the human psyche. Without a doubt, the experience is profound, terrible, frightening—and incomprehensible. How does it affect our life? How can we find a place for it in relationship to everything else in our life? What really scares me is a too-easy transition that lets us fall back into it; that’s one of my fears.

Sotinel asked whether, because the story is set at the time of Scorsese’s childhood, memories came back to him during the shoot. Scorsese said:

Absolutely. Including the paranoia, the fear. I grew up with it. I was affected by this fear, during my childhood, in the street and in church. Even if the church was sometimes soothing. In any case, I was affected by fear in the movie theatre. The films noirs—I saw “Out of the Past” at age seven, “The Big Heat,” by Fritz Lang, or “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” by Don Siegel. And also the fact that it was an Italian-American neighborhood. Of course the family was very strong, but there was organized crime. When you live in its bosom, when you grow up in it, you bathe in an atmosphere of secrets and of paranoia.

Scorsese’s remarks bring to mind the discussion in this space last fall about parents’ supervision of their children’s movie-watching. On the one hand, a child may grow up traumatized; on the other, a child who is so sensitive to the moviegoing experience may grow up to be Martin Scorsese.

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